More SolidThinking

A recent article in the Catia Community newsletter (requires free login), written by Kathleen Maher of Jon Peddie Research discusses the SolidThinking software. She uses stock screen shots from the SolidThinking website, and talks about other people’s experience with the software rather than her own. These are the typical shortcomings of getting software news from the professional press. I need to use this stuff for myself and report on it because the only info about actual usage I’ve seen has come from the company itself.

The article wanders a bit, getting distracted by NextStep, Mac, CoCreate and Rhino, and is light on new information, but I do see a couple of new pieces of info. SolidThinking runs for about $5500 now, but used to be $40,000 when it was introduced back in 1993. It’s a NURBS based modeler that is said to be as intuitive as clay… ’scuse me if I’m a little skeptical at this point. Brep NURBS modelers require an understanding of brep and nurbs, which isn’t even approximately like working with clay. Anyway, I’m interested in comparing the experience to surfacing in SW.

SolidThinking also features rendering. From the article, it sounds like PV360 rendering – fast and easy, but not much depth. Again, this is just an impression based more on what the article doesn’t say than what it does say.

SolidThinking is a partner with SolidWorks. I suppose the thinking is that the styling is done in ST while the engineering is done in SW. The extent of the partnership is that ST files (with the add-in) can be read directly into SW.